Dear team GB, good luck in the Winter Olympics 2010. Hope we win! Do your hardest, do Britain proud! Best wishes, Maariyah Syad-Paracha, Smitham Primary School.

Brought a tear to my eye that did, the voice of innocence reaching out across the ether, cleaning up in one sweet sentiment the stain left behind by the John Terry affair.

Maariyah's postcard to the 52 who carry Britannia's colours in Vancouver restored my faith in human nature. Try your best; do Britain proud. Beautiful. There is no money in it for the competitors, nothing to be gained save the joy of competing and the outside chance of a medal.

Consider this; the money allegedly shelled out by Terry to buy the silence of his latest paramour would have cleared twice over the £350,000 liability of Snowsport GB, the bankrupt governing body of British skiing that went belly up last Friday, putting at risk the participation of 14 athletes.

This is the world in which we live and why the advent of the winter Games could not be better timed, for it is an antidote to the reaching, grabbing, seedy, dispiriting culture that poisons the essence of sport. The vast majority of those competing in a British vest in Vancouver have not a hope of tasting honey. They honour a higher calling, the one invoked by Maariyah in her message, one that acknowledges the taking part is as important as the victory.

Sorry Maariyah, it could be a quiet fortnight for cheerleading. Team GB have targeted all of three medals. Not much swag in that bag. Four would equal the record returned at the inaugural Winter Games of 1924 at Chamonix. That's how potent we are on the white stuff.

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Britain is an occasional winter sport player. And that occasion is upon us. Next weekend is a big one for hundreds of thousands of British snow bores. Not Friday's opening ceremony in Vancouver. No, the action picks up 24 hours later when Britain's Alpine army points its skis towards Geneva and Bourg St Maurice and slaloms off into half-term week on the slopes. It is against this background that our champions enter the Vancouver fortnight, like club golfers swinging with the pros.

This is not to rubbish the effort or the talent of Alpine skiers such as Chemmy Alcott but to illustrate the structural difficulties imposed on our athletes by a largely indifferent nation that provides a pauper's purse in support.

Our Winter Olympic ensemble received £6.5 million from UK Sport over the four-year cycle. In the same period the American pot topped £40 million. Despite preparing in penury, Britain still manages to crash the party. Our men are world champions in curling, our women, Nicola Minichiello and Gillian Cooke dominate in bobsleigh. Shelley Rudman, the only medallist four years ago in Turin, is among the favourites in the skeleton. Short-track speed skating is the new cycling. Britain's seven-strong squad returned from the European Championships two silvers and a bronze richer.

Episodic lightning strikes sustain us. The ice rink churned heroes in my youth; John Curry made figure skating a British staple with gold at Innsbruck in 1976. Four years later at Lake Placid Robin Cousins was the one picking golden garlands off the ice. And then there was Ravel's Bolero, the working man's entry into classic musical courtesy of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean at Sarajevo in 1984. A skating medal for John and Sinead Kerr would be Britain's first since.

To the Alpine and Nordic superpowers we are a bunch of Eddie the Eagles, niche players who bounce somewhere between random brilliance and comic contributions. When Konrad Bartelski, the Dutch-reared Brit of Polish ancestry, came second in a World Cup downhill race at Val Gardena almost 30 years ago, the French commentator let go a long, slow whistle and exclaimed: "Ce n'est pas possible! C'est un Anglais."

Alain Baxter remains Britain's only medal winner in an Alpine skiing event. His slalom bronze at Salt Lake City expired after three days when a drug test confirmed trace elements of a banned substance contained in a Vicks inhaler. Though the authorities accepted that the amount involved was too trivial to affect performance, they threw him out anyway.

The rarity of the prize confers upon British winners ephemeral celebrity. More than five million tuned in to watch Rhona Martin claim curling gold in Utah.

Eve Muirhead, three times the world junior champion, has the pedigree to follow the mother of all sweepers into curling lore, and the poster girl countenance to persuade schedulers to cut away from the Champions League. OK, that might be overstating it. Nevertheless, thanks to Eve, curling is coming our way again.